The Star Wars Juggernaut

In 1999, Chris Giunta moved from Maryland to San Francisco to be among the first in line to see The Phantom Menace. He’d read that Star Wars creator George Lucas liked to screen his films at the Coronet Theatre, so he pitched a tent outside more than a month in advance. Busloads of Asian tourists took Giunta’s picture. People in passing cars threw water balloons at him. On the night of the premiere, he donned Jedi robes and proposed to his girlfriend, Beth. (Shockingly, she said yes.)

Yet sadly, Giunta hated The Phantom Menace so much that he refuses to let his three children see it. “My son is seven,” Giunta says in Chris Taylor’s How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise. “He says, ‘Dad, there are other Star Wars movies!’ I say, ‘No, they’re not real Star Wars movies.’ ”